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Wireless timeout during WPA key exchange

Windows Vista Home Premium

After much frustration with erratic WPA wireless connections, I finally found a solution that is working for me and I want to share it with the community. I would quite frequently get a failure when connecting to my wireless network. If I told the diagnostic wizard to repair the connection, it would insist that my network password was incorrect. No, that was not true and no amount of reentering it would help. Scanning the WLANAutoConfig event log, I found error messages that the WLAN security service was timing out waiting for WPA keys. I have found nowhere that says what the timeouts are or how to adjust them. But one day I had an inspiration and checked what channels my wireless router was using. I found that it was set for auto selection, started out on channel 6, and switched to channel 11 in between the time the laptop started its connection and the time the laptop queried for keys. The laptop determinedly stayed on channel 6, so of course it never got a response and timed out. The fix was to disable auto selection of channel on the router, pegging it to channel 6. It has been over a month now, and I have gotten connections 100% of the time!